Mechanics explained
What is prestige in idle games?
Sooner or later, almost every idle game offers you a strange deal: give up everything you have built, and start again from nothing. In return, you get something that lasts. This is prestige, and once you understand it, it becomes one of the most satisfying parts of the genre.
The idea in one paragraph
Prestige resets your progress (your currency, your helpers, your upgrades) in exchange for a permanent bonus that carries over to every future run. Because that bonus makes everything faster, your next run catches up with your old one quickly and then overtakes it. Each reset makes you a little stronger, and you climb higher every time.
Why would anyone start again?
Idle games are built on rising prices. Every helper costs more than the one before, so as a run goes on, each purchase takes longer to afford. Eventually you reach a point where progress slows to a crawl: the next upgrade is hours away, and buying more of the same helper barely moves the needle.
Prestige solves that. A reset swaps a slow, expensive late game for a fast, cheap early game, with a multiplier that makes it faster still. The first few minutes after a reset are often the most exciting part of an idle game: things you once waited ages for now arrive in seconds.
It also gives the game shape. Instead of one endless climb, you get a series of runs, each a bit quicker and a bit longer than the last.
What you keep and what you lose
This varies between games, but the usual pattern is:
- You lose your main currency, your helpers or buildings, and the upgrades you bought during the run.
- You keep your prestige currency (and the bonus it gives), your achievements, and usually your lifetime statistics.
Some games let certain things survive a reset as you progress, such as automation or special upgrades, so each run feels less repetitive than the last.
Different names, same idea
Games dress prestige up to fit their theme. You might see it called ascending, rebirth, a new era, a new journey or a new season. Larger games often have several layers of prestige, where a second, bigger reset sits on top of the first. Antimatter Dimensions, for example, is famous for stacking layer upon layer of resets, each one changing how the game plays.
In our game Steep & Steam, prestige is called a new season. You close the shop for the season and reopen fresh, and loyal regulars come back every season to make everything brew faster.
Flat rewards and scaled rewards
There are two common ways to decide how big your bonus is.
Flat rewards give the same bonus every time you reset, for example +25% per reset. They are simple to understand, but they have a flaw: there is no reason to push a run any further than the minimum, so players tend to reset as early as possible, over and over.
Scaled rewards depend on how far you got. The more you earned in a run, the more prestige currency you receive. This encourages longer, more satisfying runs, and it is what most well-loved idle games use. The formula usually grows more slowly than your earnings (often a square root), so doubling your progress does not double your reward. That keeps the game balanced: a reset is always worth it eventually, but never free.
A worked example: regulars in Steep & Steam
In Steep & Steam, the number of regulars you welcome is the square root of the cups you brewed this season divided by ten million, rounded down. Each regular makes everything brew 10% faster, for good.
| Cups this season | Regulars you welcome | Lasting bonus from them |
|---|---|---|
| 10 million | 1 | +10% |
| 40 million | 2 | +20% |
| 250 million | 5 | +50% |
| 1 billion | 10 | +100% |
So a season that reaches a billion cups is worth ten times as much as one that only just reaches ten million, but it takes far more than ten times as long. Finding the sweet spot is part of the fun.
Our factory game, Neatworks, takes a different approach to the same idea. Retooling the factory gives you blueprints worth only 5% each, but you earn more of them (at least four on your first retool), so each reset is a smaller, more frequent step forward.
When should you prestige?
There is no single right answer, but these rules of thumb work well in most games.
When progress has stalled. If the next useful purchase is a long way off (say, more than ten or fifteen minutes) and nothing else is worth buying, a reset will probably get you further, faster.
When the reward is meaningful. A good guide is to reset when it would increase your prestige bonus by at least half. If you have 4 regulars and a reset would bring 1 more, keep going. If it would bring 2 or more, it is probably time.
Before you go away. If you are about to leave the game for a while, think about whether to reset first. A fresh run with a bigger bonus may earn more while you are away than a slow, stalled one. That depends on the game, though, because offline earnings are often based on your current production.
Your first reset is the hardest. It feels like a loss. It isn’t. Most players are surprised by how quickly they get back to where they were.
Is prestige compulsory?
In most idle games, including ours, prestige is optional. You can keep playing a single run for as long as you like. You will simply progress more slowly than someone who resets now and then. There is no wrong way to play a game that is meant to be relaxing.
Try it
The best way to understand prestige is to feel it. In Steep & Steam, a new season usually unlocks within your first half hour of play. Start one, and watch how quickly the shop gets busy again. For more on the genre in general, read what are idle games?